Former Nouveau Lead Developer Joins NVIDIA, Continues Working On Open-Source Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Former Nouveau Lead Developer Joins NVIDIA, Continues Working On Open-Source Driver

Following last year Nouveau receiving support for running with the NVIDIA GSP firmware and initial GeForce RTX 40 series accelerated support, Ben Skeggs of Red Hat unexpectedly resigned as the Nouveau kernel driver maintainer. It turns out this longtime open-source Nouveau driver developer is now employed by NVIDIA Corp and continuing to work on the open-source Linux graphics driver...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ben-Skeggs-Joins-NVIDIA

[Spajdrex]

Ben, good luck at NVIDIA.

[letonga]

So much for the opensource driver then :-D

[clippy]

Well, I suppose this is one way to prevent him from reverse-engineering NVIDIA hardware ever again. Even if he left there tomorrow, all his future contributions would now be tainted by internal knowledge and thus legally untenable.

[M.Bahr]

@kpedersen Looks like you were right back then when you wrote this lol:

"Nah, its easy. Nvidia will just employ a couple of guys to contribute to Nouveau a little bit more now that all the real hard work is done. Then in a few years, the later generation of Phoronix readers will just worship Nvidia for their fantastic and crucial work and contribution.

Then Nvidia may even start to lock parts of it as extensions behind a paywall and people will defend them saying that they should be entitled to payment and absolute control for "all *their* hard work".

Last edited by kpedersen; 17 December 2023, 12:41 PM.

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...e3#post1429217

[Rovano]

I'm interested in only one thing. The hell will my old card ever work with Nouveau like it does with the Nvidia driver? If so, I continue to bless him.

However, I don't think anyone will do it anymore. Probably because of the license.
So all you have to do is buy a new card.
or
Use a repository where old Nvidia driver binaries are modified to use with the latest kernel.

[FireBurn]

I wonder if he'll be involved with Nova? Or if this was just a final clean up exercise before moving onto other internal projects

[mrg666]

Of course, wishing good luck to him and grateful for his contributions. I highly suspect Nvidia's intention is supporting Nouveau development as he might be out as Nouveau developer now that he knows the Nvidia driver code. There has never been shortage of talent, that is the advantage of open source. Microsoft could not kill it, Nvidia will certainly fail.

[mxan]

I hope this is evidence of Nvidia turning a new leaf.

[darkbasic]

@kpedersen Looks like you were right back then when you wrote this lol:

"Nah, its easy. Nvidia will just employ a couple of guys to contribute to Nouveau a little bit more now that all the real hard work is done. Then in a few years, the later generation of Phoronix readers will just worship Nvidia for their fantastic and crucial work and contribution.

Then Nvidia may even start to lock parts of it as extensions behind a paywall and people will defend them saying that they should be entitled to payment and absolute control for "all *their* hard work".

Last edited by kpedersen; 17 December 2023, 12:41 PM.

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...e3#post1429217

Why then did he resign as Nouveau maintainer?